Jeremy Irons Quotes

Americans enjoy uniformity in a way that the British don't; they wanted everybody of a sort of nice chorus line height and here I was, this person who was a good three inches taller than anyone else on the end of the line.

I liked the theater. I liked the people. I liked the time that we worked.

I constantly experience failure in that my work is never as good as I want it to be. So I live with failure.

I had done a fair bit of traveling during the holidays in my school days with my guitar and discovered that I could live on it. Admittedly, I traveled with a sleeping bag but I could always find somewhere to lay my head.

I was not naturally intellectual, but somebody whose interest had to be whetted, still the case sadly.

A trip to the mainland was a big event and happened maybe once a year, although now you can get across in a speed boat in seven minutes but then it was a long way away.

So the better my partner or my opposition, however you like to think about it, the better my game.

My father was a CPA. He worked hard in the aircraft industry, and would come home more and more infrequently. He was about to leave my mother, which he did when I was 15.

It's always great to play a man who sets himself up to be punctured.

The sad thing about any business I suppose, but in mine you see it particularly, is that you're always asked to do what you've already done.

At age 10 or 12 he's going to boarding school in the Isle of Wight. The Isle of Wight is, of course, down at the bottom of England just off South Hampton.

Now in my theater training I showed no aptitude at all.

I think I would not be described as a character actor in that I don't take on characteristics which are very alien to me.

An acting assistant stage manager in a theater in Canterbury, a rep theater. A small wage but just enough to get by on, and I made props and I walked on, and I changed scenery, and I realized that I just loved it.

My next step must be to go to drama school. Well, I get into drama school, so I did that.

Godspell was a good leap for me, it was a good shop window.

Actors often behave like children, and so we're taken for children. I want to be grown up.

Paris Hilton, that's very interesting what she did. I've never done that. I haven't really sort of ever got into that. As time passes, maybe I should record it and put it in a vault so that when I get a little old don't have the energy I can remember how life used to be.

What I try to do as an actor is constantly find that, find ways to risk, find opportunities to fall on my face if it's going to be worth it, and then maybe I'll surprise myself.

So nevertheless, what I'm saying is that what one is - one's parameters are constantly narrowed by one's success, and my desire is to widen my field even if I risk failure.